Category: Web development
It was beautiful I’m telling you, I was there when it happened, Oxton just gave birth… to Bite Size Standards.
Bite Size Standards was conceived by John way back in 2005. The basic idea being that busy web designers don’t always have time to read or write lengthy tutorials but that a daily “bite�? of useful information, taken or given, could be good for the soul. I’ve contributed a small crumb for you to nibble on.
So, go visit, subscribe to the feed and digest the daily bites.
Well it’s a fair old time since I had such a good customer service experience that I was left visibly ‘gleaming‘. As it happens I just had one this very evening.
For the past month or so I’ve been working on a Expression Engine powered website for a client. The last few evenings I’ve been adding finishing touches, making last minute tweaks etc.
One of these ‘tweaks’ involved a total rewrite of logic behind a section (Yes I know, not such a good idea this far in) , to be exact a rethink of how I was using the CMS to store and seperate the data. I decided to switch from using a single section to using two, one which maintained common event information, and another which recorded event dates and locations. I then used the ‘“related entries”:http://eedocs.pmachine.com/modules/weblog/related_entries.html’ feature within Expression Engine to create a link between the two.
According to the maual, this should have worked without complaint, to begin with it did. However as I continued to link my existing entries to the relevant event records I stumbled across some weirdness. A quick search on the Expression Engine forums turned up a thread which documented a similar problem, I posted a response outlining my problem and within a few hours of that initial posting I have a patched file from the development team which fixes the bug.
That is great customer service.
I’ve been wanting to perform a bit of an update on my local dev server for a while, I’m currently running Debian with the usual LAMP suspects (Apache, PHP and MySQL) but had never been able to get little extras like the GD image libraries up and running for my lack of Linux knowledge and total lack of desire to spend hours working out exactly what I needed to do.
Ubuntu has been on my radar for a good few months and I know that Oxton has been using it for some time without need for any public ranting so I thought I might give it a shot.
I requested a set of free discs (yes they are free!) from the Ubuntu website and they arrived a few days back (fantastic packaging). While the wife was out with the kids and there was no immediate danger of her wanting to check her email I swiped her peripherals (ooer) and plugged them into my target machine, an old Dell OptiPlex GX1.
The only hurdle I had to face was (Surprisignly for Linux distros) not software related, the blasted CD-ROM drive door wouldn’t open. With a bit of cajouling the disc was in, I restarted the PC and the Ubuntu setup programme kicked into action, I opted to install Ubuntu in it’s ‘server’ form without a GUI as this machine is after all destined to sit in the corner of the office whiring away with just a ethernet cable and power lead for company. The install was ‘sooooo’ simple compared to Debian, I think I only had to specify a language and time zone, provide a name for the machine (Risotto) and then I was done.
With Ubuntu up and running I did a quick install of SSH, unplugged the peripherals (and returned them before wifey noticed) then SSH’d in from my PC to uncompress and install XAMPP. For designers/developers like me I think XAMPP is great, one single install and you have pretty much everything you’ll need for day to day LAMP development, including the GD image libraries.
Success!
Another website I’ve been working on recently just went live. Pro-Bel produce control, signal distribution and innovative automation solutions for the broadcast market.
I rolled their new website using Expression Engine for Content Management. It’s a great off the shelf CMS with huge flexibility so I’m feeling like I made the right decision in selecting it way back in October. :)
I’ve been having a very interesting time during the past few days discovering what a total mess Microsoft has made of IE6 with the XP SP2 upgrade. Let me begin the story.
A few years back I wrote a simple HTML based Catalogue CD-ROM for a client. This provided users with an interface through which to navigate a large number of PDF documents. Recently they approached me to give this a bit of an update. The old version had a tree based navigation structure consisting of a number of interlinked HTML pages which displayed the contents of each branch.
Being as we now have modern web browsers that support XHTML and CSS I thought I’d bring things up to date, and simplify the maintenance process by incorporating the entire tree structure in a structured unordered list and then use some simple JavaScript to toggle the visibility of the branch elements. Sound slike a plan right? Yes.
Not long after getting something up and running I did some initial tests in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, all seemed good. I emailed a ZIP archive of the ‘work in progress’ over to the client for approval.
I hear back from the client that she’s getting a ‘Active Content’ warning in IE every time she trys to launch the HTML file.
To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has restricted this file from showing active content that could access your computer.
Hmm, ok. I open up IE, revert my setting to default just in case and test again. Lo and behold, I get the warning too.
So, what’s changed in IE6 following an upgrade to XP SP2? Well, to fill a number of security holes which might allow someone to execute code locally on your machine whilst browsing the web, Microsoft have opted to lock down and prevent any active content from running on your local machine at all (rather than fix the holes). Of course a user can ‘allow active content’ to be run on the local machine, but in most cases users will be freaked out by the dire warning which they have to manually over-ride.
Microsoft offer 3 solutions to this problem, but none of them are acceptable.
*1. Ask users to turn off local machine security*
Ok, I can’t really see any clients agreeing to that approach.
2. Add the ‘“Mark of the web”:http://www.phdcc.com/xpsp2.htm#markoftheweb’ to all your HTML pages
No good as links to other file types don’t work. I can’t add an HTML comment to a PDF document now can I.
*3. Wrap your application in an HTA file*
This is IE only, Users without IE set as the default browser are out of luck if they try to run my clients CD-ROM.
So, what can you do if you want to run an HTML based application off your local machine without having to resort to any of the above.
After a bit of digging I came across a fantastic little product called ‘“Server2Go”:http://www.server2go-web.de/’. This is a fully functional free Apache web server that you can drag and drop onto a CD-ROM. This allows you to run your HTML application ‘through’ a real web server which exists only while that browser session is open, so to all intents are purposes your users are browsing ‘online content’ and so IE is quite happy to execute JavaScript and other Active Content.
Problem Solved! :)
